1. How does it affect people?
Nile Delta
Case Study - Landform:
How does it affect people?
How do people affect it?
How is it Managed?

2. Location: Where is it?
Egypt
Mouth of Nile
Mediterranean Sea
North of Cairo

3. What is it Like?
Fan or arcuate shape
Flat and low lying land
Small salty lagoon / lakes
River splits into distibutaries
Swampy marshes

4. How was it made?
Made of silt (alluvium)
Weak tides mean the silt is not washed away
The delta gradually build up and out to sea
Inland parts become drier
Distributaries spread to the edges

5. How did the DELTA landform affect people’s activities?
Fertile farmland
Every year the river flooded so crops could grow
Every year more silt deposited
The land stayed fertile

6. Very densely populated

7. But Canopus, along with other cities on the stretch of coast where five branches of the Nile once met the Mediterranean sea, has long since been lost -- drowned by seismic activity coupled with a neglect of sea defences.

8. The silt could be made into mud bricks for building

9. How have people affected the DELTA (landform)?
1970 Aswan Dam built
River no longer floods and
silt no longer deposited

10. The river used to deposit 120 million tonnes of silt onto the delta each year.
Now it is only 50 million tonnes because the rest is trapped at the Aswan Dam.

11. So now the delta is being eroded by the sea at up to 30 metres a year.

12. And with Global Warming causing sea level to rise the delta is even more at risk.

13. In the next 50 years, Egypt’s coastal zone, home to more than 40 percent of the population, stands to be severely damaged by
flooding,
groundwater salinity and
erosion
resulting from rising sea levels associated with Global Warming.

14. Such a rise could potentially create as many as 14 million internally displaced persons
With about 40 percent of all Egyptian industry located within the delta area

15. How is it being managed?
In the fishing village of El-Burg there is an enormous cement levee which was built six years ago to save the village from being sucked into the sea.
The delta is sinking at 5mms per year.

16. A seawall defence to stop the Nile Delta being eroded by the sea.